Blue Remembered Earth (61 page)

But she wasn’t dead. They knew this when a second stutter of heat and light signalled the
Kinyeti
deploying her own anti-collision systems, this time in a coordinated strike against the habitat. Quite what the legality of that action was, Geoffrey couldn’t begin to guess: the number of instances of ships being attacked by other ships, or stations by ships, or vice versa, was surely so small that there could be little or no precedent for it in modern law. That the
Kinyeti
was protecting herself was beyond dispute, but equally, her crew must have realised that the habitat would not permit a closer approach, and that their actions were provocative.

From the
Quaynor
, all they could do was watch, transfixed, as the conflict ran its course. The
Kinyeti
’s assault had taken out the visible pirate emplacements ringed around either end of the Winter Palace. But the Winter Palace was rotating, and her slow spin brought undamaged emplacements into view. The Palace fired again, blasting another fuel tank, nearly severing the main axis and doing further harm to the command module at the ship’s front. The gas cloud thickened to grey-white smog. The
Kinyeti
retaliated, less convincingly this time, as if portions of her own defence systems had been damaged or rendered inoperable. Blast sites pockmarked the Winter Palace – some landing far from the endcaps, cratering the unmarked skin of the cylinder, punching so far into insulation that they might have touched the bedrock of Eunice’s private hothouse. The Winter Palace kept spinning, as heavy and oblivious as a grindstone. More pirates revolved into view and rained hell on the Akinya craft. There was a sputter of retaliation, then nothing.

The Winter Palace, largely undamaged even now, maintained its spin as the debris/gas cloud slowly dispersed away from the wreck of the
Kinyeti
. The tattered, broken-backed mining ship was still moving, still on an approach vector for the habitat.

No further attacks were forthcoming.

‘OK, would someone be so good as to clue me in on
what the fuck just happened
?’ Jumai asked, doubtless rhetorically.

‘Hector must have called for help, or he was late checking in,’ Geoffrey said. ‘Somewhere between his arrival and the point where it fired on the
Kinyeti
, the Winter Palace must have changed its mind about him being welcome.’ He sounded awed and appalled even to himself, not quite able to process what he had just witnessed.

‘There could still be survivors,’ Gilbert said. ‘I’m trying to establish direct comms. Resuming aug reach: we don’t have much to lose now, and it may be our only way of establishing a path to the
Kinyeti
.’ The merwoman paused, rapt with concentration. ‘Oh, wait – here’s something. General distress signal, point of origin
Kinyeti
. She’s calling for assistance.’

‘Can you patch me through?’ Geoffrey asked.

‘No idea if they can still hear, but you can try. Speak when ready.’

He coughed to clear his throat. ‘This is Geoffrey Akinya, calling the
Kinyeti
. We saw what just happened to you. What is your status, and how may we assist?’

The reply came through on voice-only comms, sounding as if it had been broken up, scrambled and only partially reassembled. ‘This is Captain Dos Santos . . . Akinya Space mining vehicle
Kinyeti
. We have sustained damage to critical systems . . . life support . . . inoperable.’ It was a man’s voice, speaking Swahili at source. ‘We can’t steer and we have no delta-vee capability. Our emergency escape vehicle is detached.’

‘They’re screwed,’ Eunice said.

‘We saw the departure,’ Geoffrey said, trying to tune out the construct but not wishing to de-voke her completely. ‘I presume Hector took the vehicle?’

‘I . . .’ Captain Dos Santos hesitated. Geoffrey could imagine him wondering how much he was at licence to disclose. ‘Yes. Of course.’

‘I’m Hector’s cousin, if you didn’t already know.’ Geoffrey glanced at one of Gilbert’s readouts, trusting that he was interpreting it correctly. ‘It doesn’t look as if you’re going to smash into the Winter Palace now – your vector puts you passing close to the docking hub but avoiding an actual collision. That’s lucky.’

‘They must have vented enough gas to push them off course,’ Eunice said. ‘But they’re still at risk from my guns.’

‘They’re your guns, you turn them off,’ Jumai said.

‘I can’t, dear.’

‘We don’t know how many of the Winter Palace’s guns are still operable,’ Geoffrey said, cutting over the construct, ‘and I doubt your information is any better than ours.’

‘No, probably not.’ The captain allowed himself a quiet, resigned laugh. ‘What do you suggest, Mister Akinya?’

‘We can’t risk endangering this ship until you’re out of immediate range of the Winter Palace,’ Geoffrey said. ‘Once we’re satisfied that those guns won’t be turned on us, we’ll close in for docking. You’ll have to ride things out until then. How many of you are there?’

‘Eight,’ Dos Santos answered. Comms had stabilised now: his voice was coming through much more clearly, and without dropouts. ‘That’s the regular crew, myself included.’

‘We can easily take eight survivors,’ Gilbert said. ‘It won’t overburden our life support, and at most we’ll only need to hold them for a few hours before UON or Lunar authorities arrive.’

‘There’s also Hector,’ the captain added.

‘I was about to ask,’ Geoffrey said.

‘Hector was supposed to return on his own – we were never meant to get that close. Then he signalled for help.’

‘He needed technical assistance?’

‘Rescuing. Beyond that, I can’t tell you anything. We think he may have been hurt, but that’s just guesswork – we were on voice-only, no ching, and no biomed feed from his suit.’ Dos Santos grunted: either effort or pain, it was impossible to tell which. ‘But he wouldn’t have called us unless there was a problem.’

‘OK.’ Geoffrey drew a breath, giving himself the space to collect his thoughts. ‘Are you in suits, Captain?’

‘Getting into them as we speak. Afterwards, we’ll crawl into our storm cellar. That’s the best armoured part of the
Kinyeti
. Should be able to ride out the worst of it in there, even full depressurisation.’

‘Whatever happens, help is on its way. I’m sorry you were dragged into this.’

‘We did what we were asked to do,’ Dos Santos replied. ‘That’s all.’

‘Good luck, Captain.’

‘Same to you, Mister Akinya.’

Dos Santos signed off. Geoffrey remained silent for a few moments, wishing it did not fall on him to say what was surely on all their minds. ‘We can’t leave him there,’ he said quietly. ‘But at the same time, we can’t endanger the
Quaynor
. We also have a duty of care to the
Kinyeti
’s survivors.’

‘If they make it through the close approach, they’ll have nothing to fear,’ Arethusa said. ‘Mira said it herself: the authorities will already have been alerted to the attack, and they’ll be on their way very shortly indeed. In a few hours, maybe less, this volume of space will be crawling with enforcement and rescue services.’

‘I’m just as concerned for your safety,’ Geoffrey said.

‘If I’d wanted to be cocooned, I’d never have left Tiamaat,’ the old aquatic answered. ‘We have an advantage over the
Kinyeti
, anyway – we still have power and steering. Mira, I want you to take us all the way in, to the airlock we originally agreed to use, but in such a way that you minimise our exposure to those pirate emplacements which we suspect may still be operational. Can you do that?’

‘I . . .’ Gilbert’s hands danced on the keypads. ‘I think so. Possibly. Whether the ship’ll take it, I don’t know. We’ll be stress-loading her to the max, to match the habitat’s spin.’

‘They build safety margins into these things,’ Arethusa answered.

‘And I’ve allowed for the margins,’ Gilbert said.

‘Let me look at this,’ Eunice said. ‘I may be able to help.’

‘Are you serious?’ Geoffrey asked.

‘Totally. Voke me active ching privilege. I need to drive your body.’

‘No,’ he said, even before he’d begun to consider the implications of her request.

‘You think nothing of chinging into a golem when the mood suits you. Nor would you object if another person wished to drive your body as a warmblood proxy. Why does my request offend you so very deeply?’

He was about to say:
Because you’re dead, and you were my grandmother
, but he stopped himself in time. The construct was a pattern of self-evolving data, nothing more. It embodied knowledge and certain useful skill-sets. That it just happened to manifest with the body and voice of his late relative was totally immaterial.

So he told himself.

‘I don’t know if Eunice can do a better job than any of us at flying this thing,’ he told the others. ‘What she thinks she can do and what she can really do are not the same things.’

‘I flew ships like this before you were a glint in your mother’s eye,’ Eunice said. ‘The avionics, the interfaces . . . they’re as ancient and old-fashioned as me.’

‘If she can do this—’ Jumai said.

‘We should use all available assets,’ Arethusa concurred. ‘Mira, if you don’t like what’s happening, you can revoke Geoffrey’s command privilege at any time, can’t you?’

Gilbert gave the merwoman equivalent of a shrug. ‘More or less.’

‘I’ll accept the consequences. Geoffrey – I can’t force you to do this, but you have my consent to fly the
Quaynor
. If Eunice is able to help with that, so much the better.’

‘You must do this,’ Eunice said. Her tone turned needling. ‘You let
elephants
into your head, grandson. Surely you can make an exception for me.’

‘Give me the controls,’ he said, popping his knuckles, spreading his fingers, loosening his shoulder muscles, just as if he was readying himself for an hour in the Cessna. ‘Eunice – I’m letting you in. You know I can kick you out at any time, so don’t overstay your welcome.’

‘As if I’d ever do that.’

He voked the rarely given command, the one that assigned full voluntary control of his own body to another intelligence. There was nothing magical about it; it was merely an inversion of the usual ching protocols: nerve impulses running one way rather than the other, sensory flow leaving his head rather than entering it.

Still it was strange for him. People did this sort of thing all the time, hiring out their bodies as warmblood proxies. He’d never had cause to ching into a warmblood himself – but if the situation had demanded it, and there’d been no other choice, he supposed he’d have accepted the arrangement without complaint. But the other way round: to be the warmblood? Never in a million years.

And here he was being driven by his grandmother.

She stole his eyes first. Between one moment and the next, they weren’t looking where he wanted, but where she needed to see – and her intake of visual information was so efficient that it felt as if he had gone into a kind of quivering optic seizure, his eyeballs jerking this way and that in the manner of REM sleep. Then she took his hands. They started moving on the fold-out keypads, rap-tapping commands into the
Quaynor
’s avionics. It felt, for an instant, as if his hands were stuffed into enchanted gloves that forced his fingers to dance.

Then she stole his voice. It still sounded like him: she could make him speak, but she couldn’t alter the basic properties of his larynx.

‘I have an approach solution. It’s imperfect, and it will still expose us to the Winter Palace’s countermeasures. If we were to attempt to match her spin precisely, we’d break up inside sixty seconds. This is a compromise that gets us to the dock and minimises our likelihood of suffering catastrophic damage. I will assume control all the way in, and make any necessary adjustments as we go. Do I have authorisation?’

‘Do you need it?’ Gilbert asked.

‘I thought it best to ask first, child.’

‘Do it,’ Arethusa said.

The acceleration came without warning, without a cushioning transition from zero-gee. To his horror and wonderment, Geoffrey realised that he could hear the engines, even in vacuum. They had been cranked up so high that something of their output, some phantom of undamped vibration, was propagating through the chassis of the ship, despite all the intervening layers of insulation and shockproofing. It sounded like a landslide or a stampede and it made him very, very nervous. Red lights started flashing, master caution alarms sounding. The
Quaynor
was registering indignant objection to the punishment it was now enduring.

It had served its human masters well. Why were they putting it through this?

‘She’s holding,’ Eunice announced, through Geoffrey’s throat. ‘But that was the easy bit.’

The
Quaynor
had to execute a curving trajectory to match, or even come close to matching, the Winter Palace’s spin. In the Cessna, it would have needed nothing more than a modest application of stick and rudder. But curvature was acceleration, and in vacuum that could only be achieved by thrust, directed at an angle to the ship’s momentary vector. The magnetoplasma engines could not be gimballed, and therefore the
Quaynor
was forced to use auxiliary steering and manoeuvring rockets, pushed to their limits. Under such a load, the possibility of buckling was a very real risk. Geoffrey needed no sensors or master-caution alarms to tell him that. He could feel it in the push of his bones against his restraints, the creaks and groans from his surroundings.